The problem is that there isn't a good and intuitive way to do this using Markdown. It's doable, but you have to do some formatting black-magic to get it that way, which is just not "nice" to deal with.

Update: In order to use Markdown, you have to indent a minimum of eight spaces. I still stand my ground that this isn't 100% intuitive - you can indent only a single space to continue a list item (see below) - but at least it's good and easy.

I see. Somehow I didn't try that, and I had missed it on the markdown editing help page as well.
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lc.Jul 9 '09 at 14:10

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That's because it seems very counter-intuitive. Thank you for posting this, I had been despairing of doing the same thing.
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fool4jesusJan 8 '14 at 14:53

There should be an easier way to increase and decrease indenting then, because all I did was use the predefined Ctrl-J indent mechanism and it didn't work. How is anyone to know that you have to do an extra 4 spaces, and then if you have a lot of lines, you have to insert these for for each and every one. Not only counterintuitive, but annoying. I do know that if you put a single character at the beginning of a line, you can force it to move over, but that is not intuitive either, esp for nubes.
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AdrianMar 25 at 0:10

Ok. Now that I look again I see it. Somehow I missed it the first time.
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lc.Jul 9 '09 at 14:09

Wish I could accept multiple answers because this is really helpful too.
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lc.Jul 9 '09 at 14:11

You should edit that guide to include @BradGilbert 'You also have to make sure that you leave a blank line before the code block'
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Aaron J LangSep 10 '13 at 9:42

1

Could you perhaps also add UI support for this? The {} button above the textbox only toggles the indentation on multiple clicks, doesn't increase the indentation. Having to do it manually (or to copy back and forth to a text editor) on long code blocks is pretty tiresome.
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sundarSep 18 '13 at 17:34

If you want to start a list item with a block of code, rather than text, you need to add at least a space character after the bullet or number, then make two line breaks before starting to indent the code block with 8 spaces.